A famous hacker is working around regulators by making his self-driving car software public

Comma.AI, the start-up run by famous hacker George Hotz, has
open-sourced its semi-autonomous,
Tesla-like driving system after shutting down the project in late
October.

The start-up originally announced Comma.AI's first product, dubbed
the Comma One, in September. Hotz claimed that the aftermarket
semi-autonomous system would give vehicles capabilities similar
to that of Tesla's Autopilot. However, after receiving a warning
from the federal government in October, Hotz ditched production
plans.

Open sourced openpilot, an open source alternative to autopilot. And the plans for the NEO, a robotics platform. https://t.co/b5028Olf1u

The cancellation was prompted by a letter
Comma.AI received from the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration that asked the startup to provide information
ensuring the product's safety or face civil penalties of up to
$21,000 a day.

Now Comma.AI has open sourced what it's calling openpilot, an
"alternative to autopilot." The start-up also made its plans
for its semi-autonomous, hardware system called NEOS available.

Comma.AI held a press conference in San Francisco at 10am PT/ 1pm
ET about making its work open sourced. Hotz reportedly said that he didn't give
NHTSA or the California DMV advanced warning about releasing the
software, according to the Wall Street Journal's Tim Higgins
who is live-tweeting the press conference.

Hotz wrote in an email to Business Insider that Comma.AI has been
"communicating with the DMV and NHTSA as appropriate." He added
that Comma.AI is open to working with aftermarket manufacturers.

.@comma_ai's George Hotz says he didn't give NHTSA or CA DMV advance warning that he'd release software to public

Hotz is best known as the first person to hack the iPhone when he
was 17, allowing people to use the phone on other networks aside
from AT&T's. He also broke into the PlayStation 3 in 2010
when he was 20.

Hotz made headlines for his self-driving car ambitions when
Bloomberg published a lengthy feature about
him building a self-driving car in his garage last December. The
article mentioned an email between Hotz and Tesla CEO Elon Musk,
where Musk offered Hotz a "multimillion-dollar bonus" to
build the product in-house.

Musk wrotein a blog post that the
Bloomberg article was inaccurate and that Tesla found it
"extremely unlikely" a single person lacking engineering
validation capabilities would be able to produce an autonomous
driving system that could be deployed on production
vehicles.